Careful manual mixing of ingredients before and during cooking often is adequate, but it may be precluded by conflicting tasks. Hence, most people have seen the inside surfaces of cooking vessels contaminated, as after tiresomely long periods of required stirring, by part of the contents adherent inside and troublesome to remove, perhaps even charred from inadequate stirring and/or overheating.
Mechanically aided stirrers can reduce the effort, and often also the time, needed to mix ingredients for cooked food products. Such a mixing aid can induce a cook to increase heating temperature in an attempt, maybe misguided, to reduce the cooking time, or may lead to a period of inattention and consequent overexposure. Hence, sticking or burning of some of the contents on the sidewall or the bottom of cooking vessels may occur and prove difficult to remove, or may even contribute an undesirable flavor to the cooked product.
Other persons have devoted attention to stirring of ingredients in cooking vessels but with diverse results not overly far-reaching. Thus, in Lambert U.S. Pat. No., 3,810,605 discloses a motor inside an auxiliary handle adapted to be retained on the top edge of a cooking vessel and with stirrer blades on a depending vertical central axle; Klauk U.S. Pat. No. 3,920,228 discloses a large cooking utensil with drive motor underneath to rotate side and bottom "scrapers" on a central axle; Clevenholm U.S. Pat. No. 4,395,133 shows a commercial cooker with a U-shaped stirrer close to but not in contact with either vertical sidewall or concave bottom; and Dubroy U.S. Pat. No. 5,372,422 discloses a removable top with a depending central axle carrying a stirrer blade and optionally an oblique blade with a V-shaped end intended as a bottom scraper.
No single one of these predecessors nor any likely combination of their disclosures meets the need for effective non-stick stirring to which this present invention of mine is successfully directed.